Book Talk: Bernard Tschumi's Event-Cities 5

Event-Cities 5: Poetics (MIT Press, 2024) is the fifth and final volume in the series documenting recent built and unbuilt projects by Bernard Tschumi. The 640-page book expands on preoccupations that have shaped Tschumi’s theory and practice.

In this volume, Tschumi embarks on what he calls a “poetics,” addressing both the rational elaboration of work and the irrational eruption of inexplicable elements in his architectural projects. How do chance, intuition, and analogy intersect with the logical play of concept, context, and program to generate innovative and informed design? Highlights include circular buildings, superposed structures using surrealist tactics, an immense educational research complex in France that straddles building and urban design, a museum in China made of intersecting conic shapes, and a cultural center in Italy that is structured as an investigation into courtyards and facades. The book features nearly thirty projects developed over the last fifteen years and demonstrates Tschumi’s longstanding interest not only in producing conceptual clarity but also in questioning architecture itself.

Speaker:
Bernard Tschumi, FAIA, Principal, Bernard Tschumi Architects

About the Speaker:
Bernard Tschumi, FAIA, is an architect based in New York and Paris. First known as a theorist, he exhibited and published The Manhattan Transcripts and wrote a series of theoretical essays collected in Architecture and Disjunction. Major built works include the Parc de la Villette in Paris; the Acropolis Museum in Athens; Le Fresnoy National Studio for the Contemporary Arts in Tourcoing, France; concert halls in Rouen and Limoges, France; architecture schools in Marne-la-Vallée, France and Miami, Florida; the Binhai Science Museum in Tianjin, China; and a large educational-research complex for Paris-Saclay University. Tschumi is Professor and Dean Emeritus at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where he served as Dean from 1988 to 2003. He is the author of many publications including Architecture Concepts: Red is Not a Color and the Event-Cities series. His drawings and models are in the collections of major museums, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which presented major retrospectives of his work in 1994 and 2014 respectively.

A limited amount of copies of the book will be available for sale at the event by Head Hi.